https://musicbrainz.org/relationship/7802f96b-d995-4ce9-8f70-6366faad758e
any objection to making this a sub-group? (thereby linking to PW and His Orchestra)
name needs to be changed to “Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orchestra”
that is my compromise offer
Paul Whiteman Concert Orchestra
Date Range of DAHR Recordings: 1924 - 1939
Roles Represented in DAHR: Musical group
Notes: Alternate listing for Paul Whiteman Orchestra.
Making what a sub-group? You link to a page describing the Artist-Artist Relationship “Subgroup”. Could you please link to the two Artist entities which you propose to link?
And, from a data point of view, adding a Relationship is a very low-stakes change. Relationships are easy to undo. I think you have been proposing to merge Artist entries together. Merging Artist entries is a high-stakes change, because it is hard to unmerge later if it turns out to have been a mistake. Let’s talk about the Artist entries which you wish to merge.
Jim thanks for explaining to any children reading this thread, try reading first
proposing making “Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orchestra” a sub-group of “Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra”, and not merging anything
Peace
Which Paul Whiteman-related Artist entries, which are now separate, do you propose to merge? Which will be the surviving Artist entry — presumably Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra artist/03ade0?
Is the reason for the merger because that better reflects the facts of Paul Whiteman and the music he brought about? For instance, did the same Whiteman draw on the same pool of musicians for albums that got labelled “Ambassador Orchestra” and “PW and His Orchestra” and “PW and His Concert Orchestra”? Did they include similar instruments, and play similar repertoire? Is it the case that the musicians did not much know or care which group name PW would eventually use? Or alternatively, did PW draw on one pool of musicians for, say, the “Ambassador Orchestra”, and a slightly different pool of musicians for “PW and His Concert Orchestra”? Did he use one name for one kind of music sold into one market, and a different name for a different kind of music sold into another market?
You say, “…our site would be best served with a listing of all the works of Paul Whiteman indexed and listed in one place…”. That seems to imply that you want to change the structure of the data in order to trick the present UI into displaying the data in a certain way. The general philosophy here is that changes like this are a bad idea. We can improve the UI in the future, so that it displays correct data better. But we cannot easily fix bad data once the UI improves. So, proposals to hack the data in order to trick the UI tend to provoke an immune response.
If you want to discuss this further, let’s start a new thread, but I did recently at least change the relevant genre from “classical” to “western classical”, with “classical” now being used just as a more generic descriptor which also includes stuff like Indian classical traditions. Of course, 99.9% of stuff under that tag right now is western classical, but maybe we can improve on that eventually 
As I announced to the world, all this thought provoking banter helped me to conceive a new path for Paul Whiteman that supported classical, avoided mergers, utilized our Relational Database to the max, and certainly upgraded the quality of data in his file.
I refer you’all to Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra relationship tab, where you can see my half-baked progress of the last 24 hours. I am looking for your advice, but be considerate, I am trying to organize 20 years worth of the largest band of the first half of the 20th Century.
The most time consuming task was evaluating and editing the existing relationships, which amounted to a net handful, after the corrupt entries were researched and ordered removed. I had 8 browser tabs and my spreadsheets open to search for each entity. I know many of Whiteman’s musicians, and the ones I didn’t recognize were not my bad memory, they were flat out wrong. The ones that were valid all lacked instruments/vocal description, and tenure with the group. I completed the valid entities, and added most of what you see on the list. There are many more needed to complete. I adopted a system to distinguish between permanent band members, and guest appearances and temporary vocalists.
I am confident that this is still a pretty rough list, with plenty of mistakes. This is not the Beatles, it is a huge number of people over an extended period. It is not done, but I am exhausted, so you guys look it over while I rest. Also, I left plenty of notes, but did not explain my primary source was DAHR, with discogs and musicbrainz. The recent work tigerman and myself did on Bing, Bix, Trumbauer covered the peak of Whiteman’s run, 1927-1929, and was of great help.
Instead of merging, I linked Whiteman’s business structure within our database, which was barely touched on. Paul is the CEO, but his primary entity is “Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra”. Then comes “Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orchestra” for special 12" releases, and most of his classical projects, but also collaborations with Hoagy Carmichael and Paul Robeson. He also created Paul Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys (see my edit notes, I explained everything!).
Most of the other mutations were created years later (probably not by Whiteman), to package and sell oldies. We certainly don’t want to merge that crap in with the quality archival tracks! Good for you Chris, for slowing me down until I realized why we shouldn’t merge on my own.
The approach you are describing in your 28 Dec (UTC) post sounds really encouraging to me. It looks like it will let you describe all the detailed facts and knowledge which you want to share, in a way which works well with the MusicBrainz project’s database structure and style guidelines. Well done for figuring this out!
One thing I think you can continue to improve is your edit notes. They function sort of like footnotes in a research paper. They are a place to cite sources for the facts you are adding (via Relationships or whatever) and to explain why a previous edit you are removing was wrong.
So, empty edit notes are clearly inadequate. An edit note like “lead vocal support I use for dance band singers that appear a few times, not members of the band” (edit #95591495) is good in that it explains what meaning you assign to the Relationship you are adding, but would be even better if you:
Good for you for making progress, and feel free to take rests. There is no reason that MusicBrainz contributions need to be a sprint. The information you are adding could justifiably be paced over months of individual edits.
Achtung!
We do have a merge issue
the end of Paul Whiteman’s file
Items year Artist Name Label
4 | 1945 Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra Coral (Rhapsody-4 parts re-record)
6 | 1954 Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra Decca
10 | 1940 Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra Decca
22 | 1939 Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra Decca
6 | 1938 Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra Decca
remaining tracks
Items year Artist Name Label
4 | 1934 Paul Whiteman’s Boys Decca "
16 | 1938-39 Paul Whiteman and his Swing Wing Decca same recycled crap
4 | 1939 Paul Whiteman’s Bouncing Brass Decca "
4 | 1939 Paul Whiteman’s Sax Octette Decca "
7 | 1939 Paul Whiteman’s Swinging Strings Decca "
4 | 1954 PW and the “New” Ambasador Hotel Orch Decca (re-record Jap Sandman)
13 | 1955 Paul Whiteman and his New Palais Royale Orchestra Decca re-record oldies
remaining tracks 52 tracks 7 groups
Go over all your definitions and see that these tiny groups fail
The most common sense plan is “Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra” as “Paul Whiteman’s Bouncing Brass” etc.
I also recommend this
4 | 1945 Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra Coral (Rhapsody-4 parts re-record)
be grouped with “Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orchestra”, because all classical tracks should be together. I would be happy to set this up and then you can fine tune classical content.
I have more classical content to group in this manner, including a full album to add to your
growing empire.
Interesting!
Could you please restate with group names linked to musicbrainz.org URLs for the Artist entry? This lets us be exactly sure we know what entries we are talking about.
What evidence was there for adding the “tiny groups” to MusicBrainz in the first place? Were those group names printed on record artwork? Or did some editor invent those names when they added the Release entry?
If someone in the music industry actually released records with those group names, that is a reason to keep those entries in the database. Or maybe those names should be performing aliases of a shared Artist entry. But let’s discuss it based on facts and edit histories.
Several come from that DAHR list with the big url. However, if they are not in our db, there is no need to create extra work entering them. See, I am tired. But I will make sure those Rhapsody In Blue tracks are … here are the urls
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/2000359522/SRC_S-16-10_SIG_101-Rhapsody_in_blue_part_1
https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/matrix/detail/2000359524/SRC_S-16-10_SIG_103-Rhapsody_in_blue_part_3
have fun
I’m really, really impressed 
Give me some time to check it more closely, but at first sight it looks great
The thing to remember about edit notes is this database will out live us all. In ten years time someone will want to know why that edit was done. So a good splattering of references is always helpful.